it alignment

A quick quiz for you: what has been the #1 task on every CIO’s to-do list for the better part of the past 20 years? If you guessed “aligning IT with the rest of the business” then you are correct. This has been an IT goal for the past 20 […]

Hmm, let me try and remember how this is supposed to go: the IT department exists to serve the rest of the company. If the department is doing its job, then the company should be able to operate smoothly and be able to outperform its competition, right? Over at Wachovia […]

So this story should probably be filed in the “it should have never happened” drawer: Microsoft has lost the information that T-Mobile users of the Sidekick mobile phone entrusted them to store for them. Wait a minute, isn’t this the grand and glorious 21st Century in which data loss like […]

You know that database that your company relies on? No, not that one, the other one that is really, really important? Yep, that one – it’s going away, are you ready? It turns out that the databases that we’re using today were not designed for what we are asking them […]

In all honesty, there are a lot of people who become CIO who really should never have been promoted to that position. There are too many IT folks who are only good at ensuring that company IT resources are properly and efficiently used. I’m not saying that this is a […]

It turns out that a company’s #1 salesperson is their CIO. They may not go on sales calls, have an assigned quota, or even be up-to-date on the company’s latest product pricing plans, but at the end of the day the CIO is the one who drives (or drives away) […]

Everybody wants their IT services for free. When you become the CIO, you’ve got to find an answer to the ugly question of just who’s going to pay you for all of those fancy IT services that your department can provide. Sometimes there’s a single IT budget for the entire […]

When you become CIO, you already know that IT security is going to be one of your biggest and least rewarding challenges. If you do a great job at it, then nobody will ever know and you’ll get no credit for it. If you do a poor job, then everyone […]

Ok CIO wannabe, we’re right in the middle of a global financial crisis and your IT budget has gotten slashed so much it looks like Freddie Krueger has come back and had his way with it. What are you going to do about your spending on security programs: cut ’em, […]

I work in the telecommunications field a lot and the gold standard of corporate R&D labs has always been Bell Labs. These guys have created amazing things that we all take for granted today: transistors, fiber optics, etc. Since most firms have no idea about what to do with their […]